Sharetribe is a platform for creating customized sharing sites for physical or virtual communities

Below, co-founder Juho Makkonenexplains its Business Model, its Open Source Aspects and the Scaleability Issue.

“Everyone can go to our site and create their own “tribe”, a peer-to-peer marketplace just for their community – whether it’s a sports club, neighborhood, university, congregation or a company. It’s essentially the Ning model applied to the sharing economy.

These marketplaces are highly customizable: people can change the texts, logos and soon also the colors to match the look & feel of their community. They can get their own domain. They can keep the tribe open for everyone or make it private and only let people in with invites, or with certain email address (like .edu). People can choose whether they want to share only goods, services, rides or spaces, or even all of them. The platform can be used for lending, renting, selling and swapping. It’s really up for the people to decide what and how they want to share.

All this makes the people feel it’s really their own thing – a place where they feel like home. By giving local admins the tools to invite new members and manage the community, we can solve the two big problems of the sharing economy – having enough traction in the area just around you, and creating trust between people.

Here are just two examples of how Sharetribe is used today in various different contexts: a single parents network from Oakland, a private group with only 50 members, and Aalto University campus in Helsinki, with almost 5000 members. We already have almost 400 tribes started all over the world, and the number is growing every day.”

The Business Model

“Unlike many sharing economy startups, we don’t charge a commission for transactions. That model makes a lot of sense when sharing more valuable items, like apartments or cars, in a global marketplace. But our approach is more about the community than the money. As Micki Krimmel of Neighborgoods and Favortree points out, sharing everyday goods and favors within your community can be motivated by totally different things than money, and creating a heavy transaction process might just be in the way. We want to let people use money if they want to, but also enable lending, helping out and giving away stuff for free.

Instead, our business model is white labeling. The tribes are free until the first 50 users. After that we require a monthly upkeep fee. It’s a lot like the initial Zimride model, but simplified: you can start the tribe, customize it and pay for it online, just like in Ning. Charging the communities not only pays our bills, but actually also helps us scale. When a community starts to pay for a service like this, they are also more determined to get their members to actually use it, so they will use their existing communication channels to make sure everyone gets on board.”

A Discussion of its Open Source Aspects:

Juho Makkonen:

“We want to apply the WordPress model to the sharing economy. Our code is completely open source, available with the MIT license, so everyone can easily download it and start a tribe on their own server.

In addition to opening up our code, we also try to share everything else we have with others, starting from our data (along the lines of the Sharing API) and all the way to our business documents (we’ll try to keep most our documents non-confidential and add them to a public folder, so that others could benefit from not having to write everything from scratch). In our blog we share the lessons we learn along the way, so others can avoid making the same mistakes and possibly take advantage of the good practices we encounter. We believe that sharing truly is the future of business too.”

Intervening on the Scaleability Issue plaguing sharing sites:

“We’ve found the right approach to make it scale: to let people start their own tribes for free, to have various different types of tribes and to let people belong to multiple tribes at the same time.

Let’s say the first tribe you join is at your workplace. One day you get an email saying, “Did you know you could also start a tribe for your association?” You just happen to be very active in your sailing club, and gear lending is a constant issue, so a new tribe gets started.

We’ve noticed that people share different things with their different networks: sharing rides to work with colleagues, finding someone to walk your dog from the neighborhood, and only lend your electric guitar to your best friends. With our tribe-based approach this becomes really easy. Our approach is a bit like sharing your digital assets with different circles in Google Plus, but applied to physical assets.

…

We realize that sharing is a very local phenomenon, and different countries and cultures might require very different approaches. We hope that the customizability of our platform will help us tackle that problem, and that we will be able to create a community of sharing-minded developers who will help people share using our platform in different markets and contexts.”

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WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.